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Talk:Half the Battle
Is this the same short story that appeared in Stardate Magazine Vol 3 #1 published in 1987? Thank you. TardisCaptain (talk) 02:07, November 13, 2013 (UTC) :No, it is a completely unrelated story. TR (talk) 02:32, November 13, 2013 (UTC) ::Strange. The story in the magazine is credited to Harry and has the same background information. I just don't know if the length is different between the two. TardisCaptain (talk) 02:41, November 13, 2013 (UTC) ::Well, hell maybe I'm wrong then. Everything I can find on this story says it first appeared in There Will Be War. But if you are saying this story appeared first in Stardate, and it was in fact the same Turtledove story...do you have that magazine in your possession? TR (talk) 02:46, November 13, 2013 (UTC) :::I do have it. I'll get it out of storage and scan the story (it's only on one page in the magazine) for the purposes of helping to expand this Wiki. TardisCaptain (talk) 02:58, November 13, 2013 (UTC) :::I have the scans. Where would you like me to send them? TardisCaptain (talk) 00:24, November 17, 2013 (UTC) GI Joe? I'm a bit skeptical of the main page's insistence on a GI Joe cartoon reference. "Half the battle" is a pretty generic phrase, and the story has no thematic connections to GI Joe, although it has plenty of connections to Star Trek.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 10:04, September 13, 2016 (UTC) :"Knowing is the half the battle" is very specific to GI Joe, which was pretty damn popular still when the story was published. TR (talk) 18:30, September 13, 2016 (UTC) :A quick bit of Googling shows the "half the battle" can be short for an English proverb from the 1800s: “A good beginning is half the battle.” However, the story uses "Knowing it's possible is half the battle." which is closer to the GI Joe quote than the English proverb so that seems more likely, especially given the publication date. ML4E (talk) 22:50, September 13, 2016 (UTC) The Gladiator Further to this, Turtledove has Comrade Pontevecchio tell Teobaldo Montefiore and the rest of the class that "knowing what is was half the battle and the lesser half". This was after Montefiore answered that the US was a paper tiger but couldn't answer why. This makes me think that the phrase, as above, has an older source since I was aware of the phrase but never watched the G.I. Joe cartoons. On the other hand, it is a popular meme so I and Turtledove, who would have been in his late 30s at the time of the cartoon, may have picked it up that way. What do you think? Perhaps a Lit. Allusion? ML4E (talk) 19:57, January 19, 2018 (UTC) :Let's just remove the GI Joe thing. I was not familiar with the proverb, and looking things over, Jonathan probably caught me on a day where I had little patience. It's not a concrete enough reference to keep. TR (talk) 20:19, January 19, 2018 (UTC)